Elusive pluralism

Between the lines

It was a laudable judgment of the supreme court which upheld the right of Indian Muslims to inherit the property that their fathers and forefathers had left behind before migrating to Pakistan. I went to town to say that no other country could have delivered such a landmark verdict to prove India’s secular credentials. It was another nail driven in the coffin of communalism.

It made sense that those Muslims who did not leave the country and had retained Indian citizenship through thick and thin should be the rightful owners of the property which belonged to their family. Still the properties remained vested in the custodian, under the tag of ‘enemy property,’ even when the owner who had migrated had died.

Yet, it took 32 years to M A M Khan, who is a distinguished son of the soil and once a UP assembly member, to establish the simple truth, his right to the property after the death of his father Raja Mahamudabad. The court rectified the wrong. He had never left the country and had retained the Indian nationality all along. In 1981, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s cabinet decided to return properties to all such Muslims who had never left the Indian shores. But the decision could not be implemented because of political wrangling.
The same elements, the communal fringe in the Congress party and the BJP came to the fore when the supreme court upheld the judgment by the Bombay high court that Khan (and his mother Rani Kaniz Abdi (since diseased) continued to reside in India as Indian citizens. The supreme court also bemoaned the wrong done by those who were in “the possession of property illegally and in a high handed manner for 32 years.”

Had the petition been from an ordinary Muslim, not the son of Raja Mahmudabad, the treasurer of Muslim League before partition, the judgment would have probably gone unnoticed. But he was a mote in the eyes of communalists because Khan had stayed on in India and had stuck to his proud position of Indian nationality. He had to be chastised.
The Indian government brought before the last session of parliament a bill to extinguish the rights of Indian Muslims to inherit the property even after the death of their father in Pakistan or abroad. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saw through the game to deny the right to Indian Muslims to inherit what their forefathers had left behind. And he acted.
The fact that the families head migrated to Pakistan did not mean that their children too had become Pakistani nationals. Since the bill required some time to become an Act, an ordinance was issued for the same purpose. But the prime minister’s intervention allowed the ordinance to lapse so that the right of Indian Muslims was not usurped by the custodian.

Contempt of court

However, the problems of Khan and other Indian Muslims have not ended. The prejudiced politicians and ‘interested’ bureaucracy do not want to release the properties on the ground that the bill would come in the next session of parliament or subsequently. What the officials, probably encouraged by some politicians, are doing amounts to contempt of court.

But in a country where there is a selective implementation of rules and regulations, the contempt proceedings of the court mean little. Even if they are started, the authorities take them in their stride. Khan and Muslims like him are made to run from pillar to post and are at the mercy of the same people who withheld the implementation of the supreme court judgment in 2005. They are determined not to allow the properties going back to their rightful owners.

My worry in the whole matter is over the communal angle which had pushed justice and fair play to the background. Such examples evoke a feeling among the Muslim community that when it comes to recognising their legitimate demands, the unexplainable bias takes over. This means that even the claim to establish a secular society remains on paper after 63 years of independence.

It is not only the denial of employment to a Muslim or the refusal to rent him a house, it is something more — the entrenched prejudice which expresses itself too often and too blatantly. The fact is that the India has not been able to establish a secular polity which the freedom fighters and the Nehru era had promised. A democratic country, taking rapid strides in the economic field, is yet to imbibe the respect for the rule of law.

This is the reason why there has been so much of uncertainty and fear over the judgment on the title suit of the Babri masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi site. The number of cabinet meetings that the UPA government held before the verdict showed that despite all the precautions the government took, it lacked conviction in its ability to enforce the judgment.

Raja of Mahmudabad is a victim of bias which is taking the toll on many people in the country. However exasperated and personally hurt, he must go on and see that the Indian Muslims who did not go to Pakistan do not have to wear the cross of partition all their life.

Jaswant Singh, the BJP leader who has refurbished his liberal instincts, has rightly appealed to the BJP to move on and not remain stuck in the middle ages. But his plea has not evoked any attention. The RSS militant wing, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, has collected sadhus at Ayodhya, where the demolished Babri masjid stood. All these things tell upon India’s pluralism which is becoming more and more elusive.